


I Never Knew Anybody Til I Knew You

by Softchelles



Category: Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: F/M, Sex, a lot of this is vague and implied, also there’s a tiny bit of violence and minor descriptions of the results of the violencs, and Michelle’s not good with the whole ‘love’ thing, but it’s not graphic, but like not SEX sex, but nothing too graphic, like they DO IT because they’re 18 and they’re in love, violence wow I can’t type
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-11
Updated: 2018-10-11
Packaged: 2019-07-29 11:35:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16263392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Softchelles/pseuds/Softchelles
Summary: The one where Peter tells Michelle he loves her.





	I Never Knew Anybody Til I Knew You

.

The door swung open so abruptly that it knocked into the wall. It was a miracle, given his strength, it didn’t leave Aaron. But even if it did, his mind— their minds— were far too occupied to have cared. Together they stumbled through his door frame, him pushing her until the back of her legs bumped into his bed. Their lips never once disconnected, even as they crashed onto his mattress. It was almost impressive. It was definitely passionate— heated and urgent because the clock was ticking and May would be home soon. 

This wasn’t the first time. This thing, whatever it was, had been going for nearly two months. There had been a first time— for both of them. After a late night conversation where she had been ranting about how virginity was a construct— a complete joke. First times were dumb and didn’t have to mean anything. He had agreed. “Totally.”

A silence had fallen between them, and there was an unspoken shift in the air that went along with it. After a few moments, Michelle had broken it. “Well. Have you? You know... done it?”

“Oh,” Peter had replied, the tips of his ears turning red as he scratched absent mindedly at the back of his neck. “Uh. No. Not yet.” A pause. A gulp. “Have you?”

Michelle’s eyes had fallen to the ground. “Nope.” She popped the ‘p’ for added emphasis, and when her eyes returned to Peter she found he was already looking back.

“Do you.... do you want to? Do— that?” he had asked, wincing at the words as they fell from his lips. She winced back. “What—with you?”

“Wha—no. No, I just mean, like, in general. Is that something you want to do?” 

“I mean, yeah,” she huffed, shrugging her shoulders. “I wouldn’t even mind if... like, hypothetically, I was doing it with... you.”

“Oh?” He sat up taller, her couch cushions shifting beneath them. 

“Yeah, I just mean—“ she sat up, hands frantically flying in the space between them. “We’re friends. And friends do that, sometimes. If they’re into that kind of thing. Why, would you be into that? Kind of thing?”

“Uh...”

“Sorry, I’m sorry. This is so weird,” she had laughed, hiding her hands in her face.

“No, MJ, wait. Just let me finish.” And he had used his own hands to move hers from her face. “That’s— Yeah. I would be into that. Doing that. With you.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

And the couch cushions had shifted again.

That night had been filled with a lot of awkward— awkward and nervous laughs, awkward and unsure movements, but they had charted the awkward uncharted territory. 

And they continued to explore.

Together.

They had gotten pretty good at it, if they said so themselves. But it had never been clearly defined. 

And it had stayed that way, until that afternoon where they tumbled in, rushed hands moving to remove clothes, her shirt joining his on his bedroom floor. She leaned back into his mattress as he left small kisses at the base of her neck.

“God, Em,” he mumbled against her skin. His lips traveled across her collarbone, up the side of her neck. Maybe if he hadn’t been so close—focused on that one spot beneath her ear, the one he knew drove her crazy, she wouldn’t have heard his next words. 

“I love you.”

It was so soft and quiet, she thought she’d imagined it. She hoped she had imagined it. But there was a thump in her chest, and Michelle needed to be sure she hadn’t heard what she thought she heard. “Hang on.” She pushed gently at his chest, forcing him back so that he was no longer nipping at her exposed skin. “What— what did you just say?”

“I... love you,” he repeated, a confused expression flashing across his face, as if he couldn’t understand. As if they were on the same page. As if he had been expecting her to say the same. “Is that— okay?”

“No, yeah. That’s— um...” She sat up, pushing him further so that he was on his knees and she was completely upright. “I just, I need to... go.”

“What?!” The confusion changed to hurt, and he grabbed at her wrist with an urgency far different from the urgency in the air just moments before. “Em, I’m so sorry, I seriously thought—“

“No, don’t—” she pulled her wrist back, holding her hands up in defense, like she was touching a wall, the wall she had worked so hard to build. “It’s—“ Fine. It’s fine. She wanted to tell him it was fine, that there was nothing to apologize for. But the words got caught in her throat, and so she gulped them back and instead shifted her attention, standing up and moving to grab her shirt. “I just, I totally forgot I had to— go.”

“MJ, please—“

But she was already all but running out the door, not stopping despite the fact that she could hear yelling out for her to wait. 

She kept running, despite the stinging in her eyes.

She didn’t stop until she was gone.   
—

Two months.

Two months completely destroyed in two minutes, and completely abandoned over the course of the next two weeks. He had tried. She’d gotten text after text, begging her to just talk to him, apologizing over and over and over again. But they went unanswered. 

And the distance between them grew.

Because she made sure of it.

She started eating lunch in the library.

She stopped making a big deal of him showing up late to practice. 

She stopped talking to him all together. 

Michelle straight up avoided him.

It was Ned who cornered her, hiding behind her locker door and only appearing once she slammed it shut. “Jesus, Ned!” Michelle clutched at her chest. “Don’t just creep up on people like that. That’s weird.”

“I know what happened,” he told her.

“What happened?” She feigned innocence.

It didn’t work.

“Cut the bullshit, Michelle.” His words stung. Because her friends got to call her MJ. But Ned was Peter’s friend first, and probably foremost. And she had hurt Peter, she had hurt Ned’s best friend— and he had every reason to hate her for it. They both did. “Just talk to him.”

She shrugged, because that’s what she did. She shrugged and she didn’t care and she didn’t do feelings. That’s the way it was, because it had always been easier that way. She didn’t understand why it wasn’t working this time. “I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t?” Ned asked with narrow eyes.

“Just! Go! Alright? Bye!” She waved him off, but he stood firm. She rolled her eyes and pushed past him, making the decision to leave since he clearly wasn’t going to.

It was only once she pushed out the double doors of the main entrance, out onto the steps of the school, that she realized she was on the brink of tears.

 

—

The kitchen was silent, interrupted only by the awkward clanging of her spoon against the side of the bowl as she poked at her cereal. Michelle could feel her mom’s eyes watching her. She knew the woman knew something was up. The observational skills were hereditary. But her mother knew better than to pry.

Michelle hoped her mother knew better than to pry.

Michelle was wrong.

“Honey...” 

There were so many emotions in the nickname. Concern, pity... urging for answers, an explanation MJ herself couldn’t find. 

“Mom, don’t,” she warned. “I’m fine.”

Her mother stared back for a few moments, clearly not buying it, but eventually sighing in defeat. “Fine.” She picked the remote up from the counter and flicked on the small tv in the kitchen.

“Dozens of bystanders were injured, but they were all taken to the nearby hospital, with no reported casualties or critical injuries,” the anchor woman spoke directly into the camera. “Possibly due to Spider-Man’s intervention. There’s no telling how bad things could have been had he not shown up.”

“That Spider Guy....” her mother tried to comment, because that’s typically what they did. They ate breakfast, they watched the news, and they had running commentary to go with it. But Michelle was far too focused on the story to pay attention to her mom’s interruption. Because footage from the events of the previous night flashed across the screen, of Spider-Man fighting some monster, being thrown across the bridge and struggling to stand back up. 

“Mom, shh!” she warned. 

She watched as he staggered, shooting a web to pull himself back into the line of fire. He shot web after web, but the creature sliced right through them, clawing at the masked hero until they were wrestling, a blur of red and blue and then bright lights— flames. An explosion.

“There’s still no word on Spider-Man. Tony Stark has refused to comment on the long time rumored Avenger’s current condition—“

The rest of the words faded into the background, and all Michelle could focus on was running, despite her mother’s confused protests, out of their apartment. She could hear her name being yelled, and it made it worse, triggering a weird sense of deja vu deep within her. It took her back to a time when Peter had done the same. It reminded her there was a very good chance she’d never hear him call her name again.

Once again, her eyes started to fill with tears, and she had to violently blink them back so she could get to where she needed to go.

—

There was no reservation in her frantic knocking against the door of the Parker apartment. Her hands were fists, pounding violently as she begged the universe to let it be Peter on the other side.

But the door opened and instead she found his aunt, looking just as frazzled, eyes wide and red with a bag thrown over her shoulder, clearly getting ready to go somewhere.

“Oh, Michelle, sweetheart,” she frowned. “Now’s not a good time.”

“Is he okay?” 

May sighed. Michelle was still holding her breath. 

“He’s— stable.” 

They had never done this before, talked about him as ~him~. Michelle wasn’t even sure May knew that she knew about the whole Spider-man thing. But there was no denying it now. “Tony just called. They’ve got him at some facility upstate. I’m on my way there now.... do... you want to come with?”

It was selfish. It was so totally selfish. Maybe later, she could think about how stupidly selfish it was, because she had hurt him, and now he was hurt, and Michelle had no right to be going with his aunt to visit him in the hospital. But that would be later. Then, all she could manage to do was nod weakly and follow May down the hall, out the building, and into her car.

—

The two hour car ride helped her come to her senses.

Kind of.

Enough that she knew to sit in the hallway while May went in. She was Peter’s Aunt. And Michelle was Peter’s— well. Nothing. Whatever she had been was no more. The reminder weighed heavily in her chest as she spent the next few hours in agonizing silence.

Was it hours? It felt like an eternity before May stepped back into the hallway. She looked significantly calmer than the last time Michelle saw her, far more relaxed and at ease, and that helped Michelle a bit.

That ended abruptly when May spoke to her. “He wants to see you.”

Michelle’s stomach twisted, and she couldn’t bring herself to answer. All she could do is nod and follow as May led her down a series of hallways before they arrived at Peter’s room. 

He was sitting upright, which was good. The rest, not so much. He was covered in bruises and scrapes and burns, and she knew he would be, she was so relieved that he was— because it meant he was still here. But it was still hard to see. 

Somewhere behind her, May quietly exited the room, muttering something about giving them some privacy, but all Michelle could hear was the beep.... beep.... from the monitor that announced to the world that his heart was still beating. 

It made hers beat faster.

“Hey,” he offered a small smile.

She gave a small one in response. “Hey. You... look like shit.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Another pause.

“You didn’t have to come,” he broke the silence this time. 

“I—what?”

“I don’t want you to be here because you feel bad, or something. I don’t know.”

“Of course I feel bad, Parker, you almost died!” 

“But I didn’t,” he argued. “I’m fine. So you don’t have to be here if you don’t want to.”

“Of course I want to!” She snapped back, arms folding across her chest. “I want— there are so many things I want— to tell you. I wanted to tell you.”

He raised one eyebrow, patting the space next to him and silently daring her to move closer. She obliged, sitting down on the edge of his bed. 

“So then tell me. What is it?”

Michelle bit her lower lip, feeling the tears that kept stinging the back of her eyes over the course of the past few weeks finally reach their breaking point and start to trail down her cheeks. “I don’t know how,” she confessed, her voice cracking as she whispered. “How to do... this. Any of this. I’ve never been good at it, and so I didn’t want to screw it up, and lose you. But I did. And almost for good. You could’ve died without knowing....you know?”

His eyes scanned her face, like he somehow understood what she was struggling to put into words. Like he could translate her confusion better than she could. 

“I know,” he answered softly.

“No, but I need you to know. Like, really know. Because I’ve never had friends before. I’ve never had this before. And it’s terrifying, just how much—“

A pause.

A deep breath.

“—how much I love you, too.”

—

Weeks later, when he’s healed, when they’ve healed— he says it again. 

And this time, there’s no hesitation.

She says it back.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you didn’t hate this! It’s now 4 am, forgive my lame writing as usual. It was typed up with barely any editing in the notes section of my phone lmao 
> 
> Tweet me @ softchelles if you want to talk about these losers. They’re ruining my life.
> 
> I also set up a curious cat there if you ever wanna send ideas and prompts or anything like that
> 
> Cool thanks byeeeeee~


End file.
